Issue Auto-Reply sends to spammers too

[websavers]

When the spamassassin Spam Filter is enabled in Plesk and Auto-Reply is enabled, it seems that the auto-reply is triggered *before* the spam scoring occurs.

This means that every spam message coming in to an account triggers a spammy auto-reply response going out.

Shouldn't Postfix be configured such that Auto-Replies are only triggered *after* a message is found not to be spam?

 

[Azzure Creative]

I'm having the same trouble. Googling only brings up your question. Did you ever solve it?

 

[websavers]

I'm having the same trouble. Googling only brings up your question. Did you ever solve it?

I'm afraid not. I'm quite confident that the order of processing is entirely specified by Plesk's configuration for Postfix and as such I suspect reconfiguring Plesk or updating it will overwrite any such manual overrides.

 

[trialotto]

@websavers

I am not exactly sure what is happening on your Plesk instance, but did you

- test with greylisting settings activated? (read: spam should be deferred, hence also giving rise to auto-replies being postponed!)
- test with DNSBL blocklists activated? (read: when hitting zen.spamhaus.org positively, a milter-reject occurs and auto-replies should be absent!)

and I am really curious to hear the answers to the questions above.

Regards.........

 

[websavers]

@websavers

I am not exactly sure what is happening on your Plesk instance, but did you

- test with greylisting settings activated? (read: spam should be deferred, hence also giving rise to auto-replies being postponed!)
- test with DNSBL blocklists activated? (read: when hitting zen.spamhaus.org positively, a milter-reject occurs and auto-replies should be absent!)

and I am really curious to hear the answers to the questions above.

Regards.........

Hey @trialotto,

We've got DNSBL activated with zen plus a few others in the list. It's still quite often that spam makes it through, particularly during the activation of a new botnet when the DNSBLs haven't had a week or so to pick up the new IPs.

We do not use greylisting as clients very much dislike the 1 hour delay in receiving first-time messages.

Regardless of these values, Spamassassin is there for a reason: greylisting and DNSBLs are not 100% effective. All of this processing really should occur *prior* to any auto reply being sent, including spamassassin checks.

 

[trialotto]

@websavers

Regardless of these values, Spamassassin is there for a reason: greylisting and DNSBLs are not 100% effective. All of this processing really should occur *prior* to any auto reply being sent, including spamassassin checks.

True, but the pivotal question here (which was implicitly defined by you) was "is there an issue in the chronological order of mail processing", with that issue leading to a very undesirable result: auto-replying to spam.

My question was dealing with the topic whether the observed behavior (of "auto-replies") is consistent across specific settings, with tests using those settings allowing us to a conclusion with a high degree of certainty that something does go wrong in the chronological order of mail processing: after all, the before mentioned settings should result in the absence of auto-replies and if that is not the case, then it can be safely established that mail processing is a bit botched.

In short, we still do not know for certain that the potential bug in the chronological order of mail processing can be confirmed.

By the way, I would normally do some testing on my side, in order to identify and/or confirm the potential bug........but the problem is that I do not have the spam or the settings that trigger an auto-reply on receiving spam.

Note that I use a pretty standard setup for any test on my side, so the absence of spam could also suggest that your config is a bit "non-default" somehow: this statement

We do not use greylisting as clients very much dislike the 1 hour delay in receiving first-time messages.

is not proving the before mentioned suggestion, but it certainly is an indication that something is different: grey-listing will not commonly result in delays of 1 hour or more, this due to the fact that (external) properly configured mail servers are retrying after a couple of minutes (for instance, 10 minutes) and increasing the interval between retries, if the next (second, third and so on) attempts are not succesful.

In general, I would recommend you to share some relevant output from /var/log/mail.log, so we can have a better idea of what is happening on your machine(s).

Regards........

 

[janp-plesk]

This issue seems to have been around for quite some time. Was there ever any reply from the Plesk company?
This does not seem very logical: Shouldn't spam be filtered out before the auto-replies? Thus: Auto-reply filter after the Spam filter

 

[IgorG]

Was there ever any reply from the Plesk company?

Have you submitted a detailed report here Reports ?

 

[janp-plesk]

No, I can't do that, because I have less than 5 "helpful posts"
And this issue is probably not a bug either.

Please, click Post New Thread button and fill the form if you really believe you discovered a new bug and need to report it to the Plesk developers. It does allow us to handle and resolve your requests much more efficiently. Please be careful and do not submit any found problem with this template! Double check that it is really bug and you can reproduce it! NOTE: Only users with 5 or more helpful posts are allowed to create report there.

Maybe it fits more into Plesk Suggestions and Feedback?

 

[IgorG]

And this issue is probably not a bug either.

If it may be considered as a feature request, then Feature Suggestions: Top (2072 ideas) – Your Ideas for Plesk

 

[websavers]

We submit it as a feature request in 2016. Can vote on it here: Don't send Auto-Reply when message detected as spam

 

[daanse]

We would love to see that aswell.
At least a Setting where you can configure on which spam Score from Email Header should auto responder respond to mails.
If a Mail gets through all 100 Filters and Plugins and DNSBL, it should check if it got a score, if yes and its above 2 or 3 it should NOT autorespond.